Naji Salim Hussain al-Ali was a Palestinian cartoonist, noted for the political criticism of the Arab regimes and Israel in his works.
16 Facts About Naji al-Ali
2.
Naji al-Ali has been described as the greatest Palestinian cartoonist and probably the best-known cartoonist in the Arab world.
3.
Naji al-Ali is best known as the creator of the character Handala, pictured in his cartoons as a young witness of the satirized policy or event depicted, and who has since become an icon of Palestinian defiance.
4.
Naji al-Ali drew over 40,000 cartoons, which often reflected Palestinian and Arab public opinion and were sharply critical commentaries on Palestinian and Arab politics and political leaders.
5.
On 22 July 1987, while outside the London offices of al-Qabas, a Kuwaiti newspaper for which he drew political caricatures, al-Ali was shot in the neck and mortally wounded.
6.
Naji al-Ali died five weeks later in Charing Cross Hospital.
7.
Naji al-Ali was born in 1938 or thereabouts in the northern Palestinian village of Al-Shajara, located between Tiberias and Nazareth.
8.
Naji al-Ali lived as an exile in the south of Lebanon with his family after the 1948 Palestinian exodus, the Nakba, and lived in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp near Sidon, where he attended the Union of Christian Churches school.
9.
Naji al-Ali then moved to Beirut, where he lived in a tent in Shatila refugee camp and worked in various industrial jobs.
10.
In 1959 Naji al-Ali returned to Lebanon, and that year he joined the Arab Nationalist Movement, but was expelled four times within one year for lack of party discipline.
11.
In 1963 Naji al-Ali moved to Kuwait, hoping to save money to study art in Cairo or Rome.
12.
Naji al-Ali was a fierce opponent of any settlement that would not vindicate the Palestinian people's right to all of historic Palestine, and many of his cartoons express this position.
13.
Naji al-Ali published three books of his cartoons, in 1976,1983 and 1985, and was preparing another at the time of his death.
14.
In 1979, Naji al-Ali was elected president of the League of Arab Cartoonists.
15.
Naji al-Ali is depicted as a ten-year-old boy, and appeared for the first time in Al-Siyasa in Kuwait in 1969.
16.
Naji al-Ali was taken to hospital and remained in a coma until his death on 29 August 1987.